Mark Roye has cranked out hot meals for hurricane victims across the Gulf Coast for years. On Friday, he was headed to New York City to join a faith-based response to Hurricane Sandy.

He heads an inner city San Antonio ministry affiliated with Somebody Cares America, a Houston-based network of churches and ministries nationwide.

Somebody Cares America is working with Abounding Grace Church, a congregation in a hard-hit zone in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where many are without power and water, Roye said. He plans to arrive by today and will prepare hot meals and set up distribution points for relief work.

Roye said the network is taking cues from the local church to assess needs because it has established relationships in that area. The idea is to use grass-roots coordination and work with government agencies and major charities but look for ways to fill the gaps, he said.

“We're going to the places everybody is overlooking,” said Roye, head of Blood-N-Fire Ministries, whose volunteers conduct outreach in urban San Antonio neighborhoods from a South Side campus. “I believe faith-based communities of all denominations for the most part are the greatest investment (for) disaster dollars.”

Roye will be teaming up with two peers who run similar ministries in the Midwest. They are accustomed to preparing hundreds of hot meals each day on their “Holy Smoke” barbecue grills. They have teamed up before for on-the-spot relief during the Bastrop fires and Hurricanes Rita and Isaac, among others.

Once New Jersey opens up to outside groups, Roye and others in his network say they're planning to go there, too.